About

Curtis Johnstone is the creator and chief contributor to InsideSkype. He is a Microsoft Office Servers and Services MVP and currently an architect and unified communications domain expert working at Quest Software. His background is rooted in large scale enterprise Microsoft Exchange application development, but his focus has been working extensively with Microsoft Office 365, Skype for Business and Lync for the last 8 years. He has lead several Skype for Business and Office 365 deployments with lots of hands-on experience with everything from architecture, deployment, management, developing custom solutions, and troubleshooting.

This blog is intended to share the experiences and knowledge of Skype, Lync and peripheral Microsoft technologies to help IT managers, Administrators, and End-Users get the most out of Microsoft’s UC offerings.

InsideSkype Guest Authors

Habib Mankal is a technology professional with over 12 years of experience in the Information Technology and Telecommunications sector. He has a proven track record of successful server deployments, contact center architecture, team management, project planning, budgeting IT infrastructures, and supporting users. Habib’s systems engineering expertise and his advanced team and project management skills generate positive, productive outcomes. He currently holds an MCITP in Microsoft Lync Server 2010, Microsoft OCS 2007 R2, Microsoft UC Voice Certification and is currently completing his MCSE in Communications.

Kirk Munro is a Technical Product Manager at Provance Technologies, where he is helping build the next generation of Provance’s flagship IT Asset Management product. He is also a 7-time recipient of the Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) award for his involvement in the PowerShell community. For the past 8 years, Kirk has focused almost all of his time on PowerShell and PowerShell solutions, including managing popular products such as PowerGUI, PowerWF and PowerSE. It is through this work he became known as the world’s first self-proclaimed Poshoholic. Outside of work these days Kirk is returning to his software developer roots, learning mobile technologies like Xamarin and Ruby on Rails, and taking courses on Coursera or edX whenever he can make the time to do so.

13 comments to About

I recently read an article that was written last year comparing CS and RBAC roles when administering / engineering a Lync/Skype for Business deployment. This article is a great resource when a deployment is on premises, but what about a purely Office 365 deployment with Exchange on premises and Active Directory being synced to Office 365? I need to provide some sort of justification to management to provide me the appropriate level of access both in Office 365 and on premises. I continue to struggle with the deployment and administrative tasks on a daily basis. What are your thoughts on this? I’ve read MS articles about RBAC and roles in Office 365, but they aren’t real clear on permissions that are necessary to allow an employee to complete their job in an effective manner. And so there is no confusion, the permission that I’m concerned about are my permissions and my ability to develop / administer our environment. My permission are currently in a state that is ineffective and hinders me from completing my job in an effective and efficient manner. I am continually having to either elevate my permissions or ask someone for assistance.

The good news is that in SfB Online (SfBO), it is much more straightforward in that there are fewer options. I authored a blog article on this in 2016. It is a little out-of-date but does a good job clearly laying out what the options are and the overlap with overall O365 admin permissions:

If your responsibilities are involving areas on the periphery of SfBO such as updating user properties, you then need the appropriate O365 RBAC role. I recently authored two articles on my new blog (insideMicrosoft.com) simply laying out what the two most common RBAC roles are for common admin functions:

Do you know by any chance where I can find Lync 2010 information regarding Lync 2010 SIP+CSTA? Or who to contact? I am porting an OCS app written along the lines of http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.03.rcc.aspx and some of the xml tags and attributes used to fill the toasts are not working anymore (e.g. display-name).

Were you able to find a solution to being able to delete/edit the Lync contacts from Outlook? I am in a production environment running Lync Server 2010 with the Lync 2013 client. I have duplicate entries in the Lync Contacts in Outlook 2010 and am not able to delete them. This is causing unusual behaviorally issues when dialing in Lync. Any advice appreciated!

Hi Curtis,
I am supposed to prepare for the two exams for lync the mcts 70-664 and the 70-665.But i am relatively new to microsoft technologies and the prepration material is not enough for lync (no elearning, no books ) do you advice me to start with elearning for ocr 2007 as a beginning ? any other advice?

Hi Curtis,
My company is in the process of deploying Microsoft 2010 lync. we need a very good or informative user guide powerpoint presentation. the presentation should highlight the benefits, features, functionality, etc. of the Lync 2010.

we also require a technical presentation tailored for only the technical IT staff.

This is one of the better sites that highlight the benefits, features, and functionality. Although the case-studies are market driven they give real world examples of how specific Lync features provide tangible value to businesses and organization.

This is Denny from zohno.com. I am the creator of this free automated
employee provisioning/termination app. Since you run a very informative
blog, will you be willing to write a review for this application on your
blog?

Z-Hire automate IT account creation process including Active Directory
account, Exchange mailbox and Lync account. With a click of a button,
Active directory account, exchange mailbox and lync account will be
created. Traditionally, this process will take over 3 minutes, with Z-Hire
App, this can be done in matter of seconds.

Legal

The posts and information on this blog are provided "as is" with no warranties and confer no rights. The opinions expressed on this site are mine and mine alone, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer or anyone else for that matter. All trademarks acknowledged. Copyright 2013 Curtis Johnstone.